We are thrilled to announce the close of our $115 million Seed Round, a milestone that marks a defining chapter in our firm's history and in the broader landscape of robotics venture capital. Backed by Base10 Partners, this raise positions Gravis Robotics Capital to back the most ambitious founders building the physical intelligence layer of the global economy.

Robotics and automation are no longer emerging technologies. They are the infrastructure of the next industrial era — reshaping manufacturing, logistics, agriculture, healthcare, and nearly every sector that interacts with the physical world. We started Gravis Robotics Capital because we believed that the seed stage was systemically underfunded in this space. Today's close is validation that the broader investment community shares that conviction.

Why Now: The Inflection Point for Robotics

The timing of this raise reflects the convergence of several structural forces that have been building for years. Hardware costs have plummeted. Compute power that once required dedicated server rooms now fits on a mobile edge device. Breakthroughs in machine learning — particularly in computer vision and reinforcement learning — have unlocked robot capabilities that were purely theoretical a decade ago. And the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of labor-dependent supply chains in ways that accelerated enterprise appetite for automation by years, if not decades.

When we launched Gravis Robotics Capital, we asked ourselves a simple question: where is the gap in the capital stack? The answer was clear. Late-stage growth equity and strategic corporate venture arms had plenty of capital chasing proven robotics platforms. But the companies that would become those platforms in five to ten years — the ones still wrestling with core engineering challenges, still iterating on their go-to-market model, still building their first pilot customer relationships — were starved of focused, patient, domain-expert capital.

That is the gap we are built to fill. Our $115M Seed Round gives us the resources to write meaningful checks at the earliest stages, to follow on as our companies grow, and to do so with the conviction that comes from deep operational expertise in robotics, manufacturing, and automation systems.

Base10 Partners: A Strategic Partnership Built for This Moment

We could not be more proud to have Base10 Partners as the anchor backer of this raise. Base10 is one of the most thoughtful and conviction-driven firms in venture capital, known for their thesis-driven approach to automation and their commitment to backing founders who are building enduring companies. Their track record across enterprise software, fintech, and automation technology speaks for itself.

But beyond the brand, it is the intellectual alignment that makes this partnership so valuable. Base10's core investment thesis centers on the automation of the Real Economy — the idea that the technologies transforming digital-native industries will inevitably ripple through every corner of the physical economy. We share that thesis completely. Robotics is not a niche — it is the mechanism through which automation reaches manufacturing floors, warehouse aisles, surgical suites, and farmland.

Base10's network, their experience supporting founders through the messy middle years of company-building, and their global reach will be additive to everything our team brings. We view this as a true partnership, and we are grateful for their confidence in our vision.

What This Capital Enables

Let us be concrete about what $115M of seed-stage capital can accomplish in the robotics ecosystem. Robotics is a capital-intensive discipline. Even the most lean and capital-efficient hardware startup needs resources to procure components, build prototypes, run safety validation cycles, and staff the specialized engineering talent required to bring a robotic system from laboratory proof-of-concept to a deployable product. Undercapitalized seed rounds in this space often result in founders being forced to raise prematurely, accepting poor terms, or cutting corners on validation that causes problems later.

Our fund size allows us to write initial checks in the $2M to $8M range and maintain meaningful reserves for follow-on participation. This structure lets us be genuine long-term partners to our founders rather than passive observers who get diluted away before the real value creation happens. We can support our portfolio companies through multiple development milestones, giving them the runway to do the work right.

Beyond capital, the fund enables us to invest in our own platform. We are growing our team of operating advisors — experienced robotics engineers, supply chain executives, and enterprise sales leaders who have built and scaled companies in these domains. This network is available to every Gravis portfolio company from day one.

Our Investment Focus: The Categories We Are Most Excited About

With this fund, we will invest across the full spectrum of robotics and automation, but we have identified several categories where we believe the opportunity is especially compelling in this vintage.

Industrial Automation and Collaborative Robotics: The manufacturing sector is in the early innings of a transformation that will unfold over decades. Legacy industrial robots are expensive, inflexible, and require extensive engineering to deploy. The next generation of collaborative robots — lighter, smarter, easier to program — opens automation to thousands of small and mid-size manufacturers who have been priced out of the market until now. We are looking for teams building the hardware, software, and deployment infrastructure that makes this wave possible.

Autonomous Mobile Robotics for Logistics: E-commerce has permanently reset consumer expectations around delivery speed. Fulfillment centers are under enormous pressure to operate faster, more accurately, and with greater flexibility. Autonomous mobile robots and robotic picking systems are moving from early pilots to core infrastructure in the world's largest logistics networks. We want to back the companies defining the architecture of tomorrow's warehouse.

Surgical and Medical Robotics: Surgical robotics has proven its value across multiple procedures, but the market remains dominated by a small number of incumbents with aging platforms. We see enormous white space in specialized surgical robots targeting procedures that are high-volume, technically demanding, and underserved by current systems. We are also watching the medical device robotics space — automated pharmacy, lab automation, and rehabilitation robotics — with great interest.

Agricultural Robotics: Agriculture is one of the most labor-intensive industries in the world and one of the most underserved by automation. Advances in outdoor autonomy, computer vision for plant health monitoring, and precision actuation are finally making farm robotics viable at scale. This is a category where we expect to see major breakthrough companies emerge in the next five years.

Robotics Software and AI: The hardware is increasingly commoditizing. The defensible differentiation in many robotic systems will lie in the perception, planning, and learning software that runs on top of commodity actuators and sensors. We are excited about companies building foundation models for robotics, simulation platforms for training and testing, and software stacks that unlock interoperability across robotic hardware.

A Note to Founders

If you are building in any of these categories — or in an adjacent space we have not mentioned — we want to hear from you. We are not passive capital. When you take a check from Gravis Robotics Capital, you get a team that has built robots, deployed automation systems, navigated enterprise sales cycles, and worked through the engineering challenges you are facing. We lead rounds, we write meaningful checks, and we show up when things get hard.

We believe the most important robotics companies of the next decade are being founded right now. Many of them will start with a small team, a compelling prototype, and a clear thesis about where the market is going. Those are exactly the companies we want to partner with from the beginning.

The application of robotics and automation to the real economy is not a question of whether — it is a question of when and who. We are here to accelerate the when and to back the who. This $115M Seed Round is the beginning of that work.

Key Takeaways

  • Gravis Robotics Capital has closed a $115 million Seed Round in August 2021, anchored by Base10 Partners.
  • The fund targets seed-stage robotics and automation companies across industrial, logistics, medical, agricultural, and software categories.
  • Initial check sizes range from $2M to $8M, with meaningful reserves for follow-on investment.
  • Base10 Partners' automation thesis and global network make them the ideal anchor backer for this fund.
  • The fund is open to founders across all robotics verticals — outreach is welcomed.

Conclusion

The close of our $115M Seed Round is a beginning, not an end. The work ahead — sourcing the right founders, providing the right support, and helping build companies that endure — is what we are here to do. We are deeply grateful to Base10 Partners for their belief in our vision, to the limited partners who trusted us with their capital, and to the robotics and automation founders who inspire us every day with the ambition and rigor of their work.

We are just getting started. Reach out to us if you are building the future of physical intelligence.